I hold a degree in Social Communication with a specialization in Advertising. I was always the writer in my college group, which eventually led me to work in inbound marketing and, ultimately, break into the gaming industry. To hone my skills, I took a journalism course where I learned the craft’s core principles, including fairness and impartiality.
However, I must confess that I still fall short of those principles. As soon as we received Calamity Angels: Special Delivery for review, and I saw it was from Compile Heart, my reaction was anything but impartial. I understand that games from Compile Heart, and by extension Idea Factory, are an acquired taste, one that I had yet to acquire after trying my hand at Record of Agarest War and Hyperdimension Neptunia, two JRPGs that I ended up dropping.
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So, I aligned my expectations and welcomed the game with an open heart and mind. After all, this time I was playing for work, not leisure, even though I love and (mostly) have fun with what I do. Fair enough, the first hour or so with Calamity Angels pumped me up for what was coming. Unfortunately, the only thing that awaited me, amidst gorgeous artwork and a few scattered giggle-ish dialogues, was a flat, monotonous experience.
Delivery Workers to the Rescue
The whole theme of Calamity Angels: Special Delivery revolves around couriers. In the game’s world, every road is populated by beasts or Omoirukais (corrupted fairies), so to send information, items, or letters from one place to another, they need the expertise of Delivery Workers, who are basically warrior mailmen. Our protagonist, Yuri, is the leader of the Cutie Angels, a team of wacky and eccentric characters ostracized by every other Delivery Worker team.
And that’s it. That’s all there is to know about the story of Calamity Angels. The game builds up its own lore by saying that each package is filled with Omoi, the feelings of the senders, which attract the Omoirukais. Only the power of Delivery Workers is capable of defeating those nasty monsters, technically making our protagonist and his team a force to be reckoned with, alongside other teams.
The whole narrative sauce is built on the quirkiness of each party member. Yuri is an eager leader, a stickler for rules, and very hardworking. However, when he is thrown into a team of weirdos, he sees his leadership and orders contested or misinterpreted at every turn. At first, it’s pretty amusing because the game presents characters whose own archetypes contrast within themselves, bringing some originality to the script.
The whole narrative sauce is built on the quirkiness of each party member.
For instance, we have Suliya, a greedy healer. She is in this line of work to traverse the world in search of treasure and riches, and her personality is reflected in battle. While most skills cost SP, Suliya instead charges money to use her healing skills, which ties well into her character. There’s also Ivris, a Martial Mage, and as you may have guessed, she’s a hotheaded mage who prefers to handle any problem with barehanded fights instead of spellslinging.
The script doubles down, or even triples down, on every character’s unorthodox personality until the end. The game features anime-style comedy writing, where even the most mundane exchanges become ludicrous and often derail the entire conversation. For instance, while they are arguing, Ivris will always go into a fit, throwing punches (or threatening to) all around, while Somnia, a sleep-deprived fighter, will be half-awake every single time, either babbling something indecipherable or being scolded for falling asleep in any weird corner possible.
And as I said, it’s entertaining in the first hour or two. However, their personalities often flash way too brightly, hogging the spotlight of any meaningful story beat or plot. I mean, the game doesn’t even have a plot, per se. It just goes on and on, trying to shoehorn a conflict simply to move the needle forward, but failing to engage with the story being told. If you don’t like the characters, you may as well just skip the entire game.
Battles Get Tense
One way Calamity Angels highlights each character’s temperament even more is in battle. The JRPG follows a traditional turn-based style, where everyone acts according to their agility, and after we choose a command, they act. Each person’s command depends on their occupation. Ivris can attack with martial arts or elemental magic, while Suliya can heal or cast curse spells. Every single character also has a Defense command, but with different effects.
The JRPG innovation lies in a mechanic called Tension. Before acting, a character’s portrait expression reveals their predisposition to use the highlighted command. Ivris prefers to get into a scrap, so many times whenever I tried to choose magic, she would be displeased and might very well refuse the spell and go for a kick instead. The benefit is that if she used a skill of her own volition, that ability would have a greater effect, whether it is higher damage, more hits, or increased critical chance.
The game features anime-style comedy writing, where even the most mundane exchanges become ludicrous and often derail the entire conversation.
Suliya will almost always accept using abilities that cost money, but she might refuse to heal if the cost is SP. Meanwhile, Somnia may fall asleep mid-battle instead of swordplaying, which increases her attack power and Tension. Also, picking abilities that the characters are more disposed to increases their Tension, which in turn makes them more obedient.
This mechanic applies to all six party members. Since we can only bring three into combat, there are potentially some neat combos. The archer idol, Luminous, has a singing skill that increases the whole party’s Tension. Selma is a cowardly Paladin, and she will annoyingly refrain from attacking due to fear, but with Luminous’ buffs, she might comply more often.
Initially, the mechanic was really gripping. I would set up strategies in which I consciously used an ability the character didn’t want to use, because if they pulled back and used another, it would have an added effect. But later on, it simply became annoying. Common battles that could be ended by a single area-of-effect attack would drag on for two or three rounds simply because no character felt like obeying my commands.
Somnia is the best single-target DPS in the game, but do you know how frustrating it is to try to use a triple slash, and instead she favors sleeping for four whole turns? The battle usually ended before she would wake up, making her whole presence just irrelevant. Every single battle was filled with randomness, and not of the good kind. There’s little to almost zero strategy in battles when everything boils down to luck, or spamming Tension buff skills or items, which doesn’t necessarily translate into fun.
Every character also has several Special Techniques that can be triggered in battle due to some weird condition or just sheer happenstance. Those Special Techniques are usually way overpowered skills that can decimate the entire opponent’s team in one go. Sometimes, however, they can fail, or even backfire. The stupid alchemist Numero has a Chemical Slots skill that randomly picks a debuff or buff and a target. It once caused instant death to one of my party members out of nowhere, and I couldn’t even choose not to cast the Slots because it’s mandatory once it is triggered.
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A Board-like Exploration
Before engaging in battles, the game explains that its whole loop hinges on our ability to deliver items. We pick up a delivery at the guild, organize the to-be-delivered object in a limited grid-based inventory, and then pay a visit to the recipient on a specific map. Once we enter an area, exploration plays like a board game. We have numerous squares, a roulette determines our movement, and once we land on specific spaces, an event may occur, such as a battle, a buff or debuff, a shop, or something varied.
Once again, the whole board system made a good impression at first, but it soon fell into mindless repetition. The randomness of some squares boils down to dealing damage or getting a potion. Since every area is fixed, you know exactly what to expect from them. They aren’t necessarily visually impressive, and it often gets hard to tell them apart because their biomes are uninspired.
Encountering enemies also becomes increasingly tiring, given that we have only a handful of variations of them, and the stronger versions are just palette swaps. The Omoi Power feature, which determines that we get a bonus if we make a delivery faster, is just an afterthought because the bonus is usually more gold or potions. There are great bonuses in the form of weapons in character quests, but they are very few and far between.
It’s a bummer, really. The whole gameplay style, intertwined with every character’s personality, and the board-like exploration seemed like a great formula to me. I was amused when I saw that I needed to spend money to heal and the whole Tension mechanic twist, but the game didn’t seem to know how to capitalize on the system, and it soon became tiresome, more of a hassle than a fun mechanic. Not to mention that every character’s skill feels the same from the first couple of hours till the endgame. We learn new ones at every rank-up as a Delivery Worker, but their evolutions are summarized as dealing more damage, whether to a single or multiple targets.
Once again, the whole board system made a good impression at first, but it soon fell into mindless repetition.
Calamity Angels: Special Delivery is pretty short. I clocked it in 10 hours, but the game felt much longer because I was excruciatingly bored. However, I’ve got to give it to Compile Heart, because they really know how to make relatable characters. I sympathized with the sleep-deprived Somnia because I also had trouble staying awake for the entire game.
I got the Platinum trophy after 27 hours because, besides hating myself, I’m a chronic completionist when it comes to JRPGs. The endgame was still repetitive, and many trophies relied too much on RNG.
Beautiful and Cozy Artstyle
Whenever I play a video game, I try to comprehend its purpose and intention. It is my favorite hobby, and I like to appreciate everything a title offers me, from its unusual mechanics to its artistic proclamations or how it tries to bend a staple upside down. I don’t feel joy in criticizing a game negatively, especially because I know there was (probably) a team of passionate creators behind it.
This care can be seen in the artstyle of Calamity Angels. Each character is beautifully drawn, with an aesthetic and outfits that match their manners. It makes sense, as all the illustrations were by Kei Nanameda, the character designer for games like Mary Skelter and Mugen Souls Z. If you like that style, which is very prominent within Idea Factory, you will feel at home.
It is a pity that this care doesn’t extend to the rest of the game. In battle, the animations are as simple as possible, and only the Special Techniques receive more emphasis. The enemies also barely move while attacking, reduced to almost static images that look like GIFs. There are some illustrations during cutscenes — those presented in a very charming Visual Novel style — which are gorgeous. It’s just a shame you can count on one hand how many of these illustrations there are in the entire game.
The first 30 minutes of Calamity Angels hooked me. The tension system seemed like a great novelty for turn-based combat, and the contrasting character archetypes brought fun personalities. Unfortunately, the game spent the next 10 hours spinning its wheels, forgoing any gameplay development and turning its entire runtime into a mind-numbing loop. If Compile Heart had fully fleshed out its own innovations, Calamity Angels: Special Delivery could have been a compelling game, but as it stands, it is just a shallow and forgettable experience.
- ESRB
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Teen / Fantasy Violence, Language
- Number of Players
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Single-player
- Steam Deck Compatibility
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Unknown
- Some funny dialogue exchanges
- Beautiful artwork and character design
- The gameplay loop is mind-numbingly repetitive
- Story, narrative, and lore fail to engage and build a compelling plot
- The Tension mechanic starts engaging, but soon becomes annoying
- Every single battle hinges too much on randomness, robbing all the fun
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